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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Gulf War Stories the Media Loved -- Except They Aren't True "Even though a story can be incredibly preposterous in the Western mind, it can resonate deeply in other parts of the world," Todd Levanthal, a U.S. Information Agency specialist on disinformation, told the New York Times (9/16/90). "The key is predisposition to believe, not the crudity of the charge." While the point of the article was to portray Arabs as conspiratorial and irrational, the U.S. media's acceptance of crude charges about the official enemy demonstrates that a "Western mind" is no barrier to a "predisposition to believe." Most U.S. news outlets uncritically accepted the story that 300 premature babies died when Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were sent to Iraq as loot. Alexander Cockburn (Nation, 2/4/91), an exception, cited Kuwaiti medical personnel who went into exile after the invasion, who said that babies were still in incubators at Kuwait's Maternity Hospital in September, and that empty incubators had not been taken. After the end of Iraqi occupation, the New York Times (2/28/91) offered this two-sentence retraction, buried five-sixths of the way through an article: "Some of the atrocities that had been reported, such as the killing of infants in the main hospitals shortly after the invasion, are untrue or have been exaggerated, Kuwaitis said. Hospital officials, for instance, said that stories circulated about the killing of 300 children were incorrect." To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1515 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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